[LS]

Have been having a running argument with long-time county chairman and GOP insider based in Columbus who claims that new OH law says that if you did not vote in 2012 primary, you lost your D/R designation and became "unaffiliated." Ohio SoS office said the opposite, that you retain for six years, but this fellow replied "Did you talk to Husted? I did." Well, no. with all my "prestige" (lol) I can't just get the SoS on the line.

But I can run an analysis, and did so on absentees only (not early votes). I can't post because of formatting. If someone can post a Word document, I'm happy to send you what SoftwareEngineer put some of it in Excel, but only did 10, and this does not include Cuyahoga or Franklin).

Conclusions of my mini-study:

*I looked at the first 27 OH counties alphabetically, which includes Franklin, Clark, and Cuyahoga.

*The hypothesis is that if you automatically lose your party ID because you don't vote in a primary, then a decline of 30,000 Ds from 2008 should be offset by an increase of 30,000 Is in 2012. Didn't happen, except in two cases, Adams and Columbiana. There, large D decreases were matched with large I increases. But in Champaign, Ds lost 71% from 08, but Is only rose 11%. Cuyahoga lost .08% but Is only increased .04%. (Rs gained 30%)

*Franklin Ds fell 30%, but Is fell as well, only at -17%.

In short, it's very hard to find a "swap out" explanation for the D declines in OH.

[SoftwareEngineer]

In regards to this post:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2954733/posts#21

I will happily email anyone the Excel sheet I created for LS

It has all the formulas done. All you need to do is plug in raw data for BOTH 2008 and 2012 PER COUNTY in a D/R/I format and you can the difference immediately that the D dropff does NOT match the I uptick. Infact there was a demonstrable R uptick in the first 10 counties that LS sent

[AFPhys]

LS: Try copying the text of the Word doc, and then pasting it to FR between <pre> </pre> tags